The complete work consists of upwards of ioo,000 couplets— its contents thus being nearly eight times the bulk of the Iliad and Odyssey combined. It is divided into eighteen books, with a supplement, entitled Harivarriga, or genealogy of the god Hari (Krishna-Vishnu). The portion relating to the feud of the rival houses constitutes somewhere between a fourth and a fifth of the work; and it is by no means improbable that this portion once formed a separate poem, called the Bharata. While some of the episodes are so loosely connected with the story as to be readily severed from it, others are so closely interwoven with it that their removal would seriously injure the very texture of the work. This, however, only shows that the original poem must have undergone some kind of revision, or perhaps repeated revisions. That such has indeed taken place, at the hand of Brahmans, for sectarian and caste purposes, cannot be doubted. According to Lassen's opinion, which has been very generally accepted by scholars, the main story of the poem would be based on historical events : on a destructive war waged between the two neighbouring peoples of the Kurus and Panchalas, who occupied the western and eastern parts of the Madhyadega (or "middle land" between the Ganges and Jumna) respectively, and ending in the overthrow of the Kuru dynasty. On the original accounts of these events— perhaps handed down in the form of lays or sagas—the Pandava element would subsequently have been grafted as calculated to promote the class interests of the Brahmanical revisers.
considerable skill and tact; and if in the present version of the work much remains that seems contrary to the Brahmanical code and pretensions—e.g., the polyandric union of Draupadi and the Pandu princes—the reason probably is that such features were too firmly rooted in the popular tradition to be readily eliminated; and all the revisers could do was to explain them away as best they could. Thus Draupadi's abnormal position is actually ac counted for in five different ways, one of these representing it as an act of duty and filial obedience on the part of Arjuna who, on bringing home his fair prize and announcing it to his mother, is told by her, before seeing what it is, to share it with his brothers. The epic in time became a great treatise on duty (dharma) in culcating the divine origin of Brahman institutions, the caste system and the superiority of the priestly caste not only over the people but over kings. From inscriptions we know that by the end of the 5th century A.D. the Mahabharata was appealed to as an authority on matters of law, and that its extent was practically what it now is, including its supplement, the Hari varriga. Indeed, everything seems to point to the probability of the work having been complete by about A.D. 200. But, whilst Bharata and Kuru heroic lays may, and probably do, go back to a much earlier age, it seems hardly possible to assume that the epic in its present form can have been composed before the Greek invasion of India, or about 30o B.C. Moreover, it is by no means impossible that the epic narrative was originally composed--as some other portions of the works are—in prose, either continuous or mixed with snatches of verse. The leading position occupied in the existing epic by Krishna (whence it is actually called karshfia–veda, or the veda of Krishna), and the Vaishnava spirit pervading it, make it very probable that it as sumed its final form under the influence of the Bhagavata sect with whom Vasudeva (Krishna), originally apparently a vener ated local hero, came to be regarded as a veritable god, and in carnation of Vishnu. Its culminating point this sectarian feature attains in the Bhagavat-gita (i.e., the upanishad), "sung by the holy one"—the famous theosophic episode, in which Krishna, in lofty and highly poetic language, expounds the doctrine of faith (bhakti) and claims adoration as the incarnation of the supreme spirit. Of the purely legendary matter incorporated with the leading story of the poem, not a little, doubtless, is at least as old as the latter itself. Some of these episodes—especially the well-known story of Nala and Damayanti, and the touching legend of Savitri—themselves form epic gems of high poetic value.